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Lockups: watching tv while browsing web

04-04-2008, 02:19 PM

I seem to get a hard lockup if I'm watching tv in a window while browsing the web with seamonkey in the background. The screen freezes, the mouse can't move, sysrq doesn't respond, I have to hit the reset button. Phoronix forums seem particularly good and triggering the lockup, this is the third time I've typed out this post.

For tv, I have a usb HVR 900, using the em28xx driver from the latest hg v4l-dvb sources. This driver should be stable since it'll be included in a future kernel version.

The graphics card is a Radeon 9550SE in an APG 4X SiS 650 based motherboard.

I'm using the latest git xf86-video-ati, I've tried various options, none of which have helped:

I seem to get a hard lockup if I'm watching tv in a window while browsing the web with seamonkey in the background. The screen freezes, the mouse can't move, sysrq doesn't respond, I have to hit the reset button. Phoronix forums seem particularly good and triggering the lockup, this is the third time I've typed out this post.

For tv, I have a usb HVR 900, using the em28xx driver from the latest hg v4l-dvb sources. This driver should be stable since it'll be included in a future kernel version.

The graphics card is a Radeon 9550SE in an APG 4X SiS 650 based motherboard.

I'm using the latest git xf86-video-ati, I've tried various options, none of which have helped:

Comment

Sadly, BusType PCI didn't help, I got a lockup while refreshing phoronix forums while watching tv, after about 15 minutes.

And as expected, BusType PCI halves OpenGL performance, not just glxgears, but peak fps in extreme tuxracer goes from 50 to 20.

Well, I can think of three things to try:

Try to get a lockup while browsing HTML off my harddisk (I don't remember any).

Try to get a lockup while playing videos off my harddisk, instead of tv (again, I can't remember any).

Try the Fedora kernel instead of my own vanilla kernel. That has a newer rt2x00 driver for my ralink wireless card. (But I recall lockups both using the rt61 legacy driver and the rt2x00 driver in 2.6.24).

Edit: I've had sdlmame outputting yuy2 to xvideo (the same format that mplayer displaying tv uses) for 20 minutes while web browsing without any lockups. That suggests the problem is in the em28xx or rt2x00 drivers and not radeon.

Comment

Well once I finally got the Fedora 8 kernel to boot (I haven't switched to libata drivers for my IDE drives, so I needed to recreate the initrd from a rescue cd), all I discovered is that the system froze the instant the rt61pci module was loaded.